David Adair

Electromagnetic Fusion Engine Specialist

Examined ET Technology in 1971 at Area 51

An Amazing Interview with Robert M. Stanley

“Do you know that in proportional size, this engine has 10,000 times the thrust of the F-1, Saturn V engines, Dr. Rudolph?”

ROBERT: Whom was Dr. Rudolph working for?

DAVID: I’m not sure, one of those alphabet-soup intelligence agencies. But he was primarily working for NASA. And as soon as he got off the plane, he asked to see my rocket. When I asked him who he was, he told me, “Oh, I’m just a guy that inspects rockets for the government.” Then I asked him if he was from NASA, and he said he had never worked there.

So we walked over to my rocket and I opened up a side panel. And when he leaned over to look at the engine, he began mumbling to himself and he seemed really upset - probably because I had built something he thought was impossible to do. So I took that opportunity to lean over and whisper in his ear, “Do you know that in proportional size, this engine has 10,000 times the thrust of the F-1, Saturn V engines, Dr. Rudolph?” And he stood up and was furious. He wanted to know who I was and how I knew so much. And I told him, “I’m just a kid that launches rockets in the cow fields of Ohio.” [Laughter] Anyway, I had friends around me who were Air Force colonels that LeMay had assigned to take care of me.

And I got upset when Dr. Rudolph told me that he wanted to change the landing coordinates on my rocket. He was really nasty about it. The navigation system I was using was off-the-shelf stuff. Back in those days, it was all analogue. But I had my system programmed to where the rocket would come back down within a two-mile radius of the launch site. Dr. Rudolph had me reprogram the coordinates so that my rocket would land 456 miles northwest of White Sands in an area called Groom Lake, in Nevada.

Well, I immediately pulled out my national survey maps and I looked at Groom Lake and thought, “My God! Why are we launching up to a dry lake bed in Nevada? It’s so far away.” That’s when Dr. Rudolph told me, “Just do it!” He was really hostile. And I had been warned many times by von Braun and LeMay that if I ran into Dr. Rudolph, not to push his buttons.

So I reset the coordinates on the guidance system and we launched my rocket and it took off perfectly. And sure enough, it landed right on target. And you know, it wasn’t until they made the movie Independence Day that I ever heard the term “Area 51”.

ROBERT: How could that be?

DAVID: I always knew this place as Groom Lake. It was the only name I had ever heard for that place, growing up. So we were getting ready to board the plane to go and recover the rocket and I said, “Hey, do you see these rubber tires on this plane? Would you please tell me how you are going to land this thing on a dry lake bed? This thing is going to plough into the ground and never leave.” Someone yelled at me to shut up and get into the plane.

After a while, we arrived in Nevada. And as we flew over the landing site, I looked down at these twin 10,000-foot runways and I said, “My God! There’s a huge base down there!”

So we landed at this place that doesn’t exist on any map, and that’s when I started getting really concerned. I was trying to locate any Air Force emblems, Navy emblems, any kind of logos or emblems that would identify the commanding authority, but there was nothing anywhere on any of the buildings. Normally, standard universal painting of water towers at an airstrip is an orange-and-white checkerboard pattern. But here, everything was painted either solid white or solid black. So they were not conforming to any code.

After we got out of the plane, we got on this go-cart-looking thing. It looked kind of like the electric carts that you see at airports. Then we drove from the landing strip to a series of hangars and headed into the centre one. It was really cool, the way this place was built. There were all these really big lights at the top that had louvers on them so the light will shine down. And when I got close to the buildings, they looked old and ratty, but underneath it was alloy, unlike any alloy I had ever seen. It was an incredible-looking stainless steel type of metal that I thought was really unusual to use for buildings of that size.

When we got inside the hangar, we went down to the basement area. Actually, we drove into the hanger and there were little yellow lights flashing and big hangar doors, and out of the ground came all these little pipes with chains attached that blocked off all the doorways. Then the whole floor - about the size of a football field - dropped down. The entire hangar was an unenclosed elevator.

ROBERT: So, it was more like a hydraulic lift in a garage?

DAVID: Yeah, but it was built to carry some really heavy stuff. The floor was made of concrete. God knows how much weight that was. The whole thing went up and down on giant worm-screws.

ROBERT: I see. That’s a lot more stable than using a hydraulic system.

DAVID: Nothing can take the load like a worm screw. These things were the size of sequoia trees, and there were at least 12 of them lifting the floor! We went down at least 200 feet until we rested flush with the floor of an underground hangar that was huge. It had a huge arched ceiling, but it went so far that you couldn’t see the end of it. It just went forever. And I thought, “My God! You could park a hundred 747s in here and they wouldn’t even be in the way!” At that point I asked, “What in God’s name did you do with all the dirt?” And they just looked really strangely at me. I guess they didn’t expect me to try and figure things like that out. The walls were at least 30 feet high, and all along them were different workshops and laboratories and periodically there were big, huge, work bays. So we kept driving down past all kinds of aircraft that I had never seen. Some of them I had seen, like the XB-70.

ROBERT: Was this area carved out of dirt or was it rock?

DAVID: I don’t know. Everything was coated with a ceramic-like material.

ROBERT: I thought there were mountains surrounding the dry lake bed? Those must be fairly solid?

DAVID: Yeah. There are all kinds of mountain ranges around that area. I never saw any “dirt”, though, because everything had concrete over it or was covered with some type of ceramic material. The most interesting thing about this to me still is how well lit the underground area was. There were no shadows, anywhere. And there were no light fixtures, anywhere. I was wondering how they generated that much light. It didn’t look like the walls were glowing, or the floor or the ceiling. But every square inch of this place was lit, and yet there was no visible source of light.

And after we had been driving for a while and we had passed a lot of different aircraft, we took a road to the left that took us away from a lot of the other activities. I could see a lot of people working on stuff. These aircraft appeared to be operational. Some of them I have never seen before or since. They were shaped like a reverse teardrop. And there were others that looked similar to the flying wing. One aircraft, the XB-70, was a delta-wing bomber built in 1959.

ROBERT: And you were at Area 51 in 1971?

DAVID: Right. June 20, 1971. So, we get there and it was just amazing, because we drove up to the side of these big steel doors and one of the officers got out and put his hand on a scanner-type thing and it flashed a light at him. I thought it took his picture. In hindsight, I would have to guess that it was a retina scanning device. And after the guy was scanned, the door opened up, so I knew this was a security system of a kind. This was 1971.

Let me put this into perspective. In 1971, we had no laptops, no modems, no fax, no VCR, no cell phones; we didn’t even have handheld calculators. Texas Instruments developed those about five years later. So where in the hell did these guys get all this technology?

As soon as we went into the room, I immediately noticed the temperature drop, because it was warm in the big open areas we had just come from. It was very cool in this room. You could almost see your breath. And as we entered the room, the lights - wherever they were coming from - came on. And again there were no shadows being cast, anywhere.

Then someone threw a switch and activated a hoist attached to some cables that were attached to a big tarp. The tarp was lifted straight up, and sitting on this huge steel platform was a giant electromagnetic fusion containment engine! And I immediately knew that, because its configuration was similar to mine but it was the size of a Greyhound bus. Mine was about the size of a large watermelon!

You can recognize engines that are comparable. If I had an internal combustion engine taken out of a Model A Ford and had it sitting on the ground and you pulled an engine out of a Viper today and placed it alongside, you would recognize that they operate on the same principle of internal combustion. However, the difference in performance between the two is unbelievable.

It was the same situation with my little engine and this thing they had stored underground. They both ran on the same principle, the same configuration, but the level of sophistication is like that of the Model A compared to the Viper engine. This thing they had was so powerful. There were so many design features that I didn’t recognize, for reasons that became clear.

ROBERT: At this point you were just looking at the engine. Where was the rest of the craft?

DAVID: Well, that’s where the argument started. They asked me if I liked what I saw. I said, “Well, yeah, but I’m confused. I thought I was the first one to build one of these engines.”

And this is where things really started getting odd. The colonel that was with Dr. Rudolph said, “Son, you want to help us with this design here since yours is very similar to it. You do want to help your country, don’t you?”

Well, I had an American flag blanket. And I listened to Anita Bryant’s record before I went to sleep. I was a real patriotic flag-waver even in the ‘70s. Of course, it wasn’t real popular to do that then because the war in Vietnam was still raging. My peers couldn’t understand why I loved America so much, but it was just the way I was raised.

So at first I agreed with the colonel that I wanted to help. However, I was very curious and asked, “Where are your people that built this engine?” He paused for a moment, then told me, “Well, they are on vacation right now. You’re off on summer vacation, right?” And I said, “Okay! That’s good. Did they leave any notes on their work that I can look at?” Then I was told, “Well, they took them with them as homework. You get homework.” And I was thinking, “You know, this is really condescending. I am 17 years old.” But that’s how they treated 17-year-olds back then. So I thought, “Okay; I will play along with this asshole.”

I agreed to help them, but told them that I needed to get a closer look at the engine. And they agreed, at which point I walked up and got onto the platform. And the closer I got to it, the more I realized that these people had no idea what this engine was; they were still trying to figure it out. I could tell that it didn’t belong to us. And when I was about three feet away, the first thing I noticed was a perfect shadow of myself on the engine. And what did I tell you earlier?

David Adair is an internationally recognized leader and expert in the field of space technology spinoff applications for industry and commercial use. He has worked as a research scientist in the fields of engineering, jet engine technology, rocket science and nuclear physics.

At age of 11, David built his first rocket. It was a cryogenic liquid fuel engine that was six feet tall, 200 pounds in weight and had enough thrust to push it to an altitude of 52,000 feet and at a speed of 1,600 miles an hour with radio control guidance and parachute recovery. The rockets got bigger and faster from that point on.

Today, there are only two types of rocket engines used today by the space agencies around the world: liquid fuel and solid propellant. At the age of 17, David built a rocket engine that was neither one, it was an “Electromagnetic Fusion Containment” engine, the first of its kind. It was launched on June 20, 1971 from White Sands Missile Proving grounds for which he was awarded “The Most Outstanding in the field of Engineering Sciences” from the United States Air Force.

David was invited to join the United States Navy, in his tour from 1972 to 1982 it was filled with engineering challenges and accomplishments and awards for serving with distinctions. During this time David became a pilot, diver and a certified jet engine technician.

After the Navy, David formed his own research company called Intersect, Inc. and for the next three decades David worked in his laboratory and is a professional speaker on the subject of Space Technology Transfer where his work continues to the present.

Robert M. Stanley is a writer and researcher specializing in technology trends. His articles have been featured in numerous publications and he has appeared on various television and radio programs. Currently he is serving as an R&D consultant for an international corporation.